Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Symbolism as a literary tool essay
Symbolism in modern poetry
Symbolism in modern poetry
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Lady Mary Wortley Montague's The Lover: A Ballad
Literature is a form of art with many facets, many obvious and others subtle. The surface of literature can be composed of many elements such as genre, form, rhythm, tone, diction, sentence structure, etc. Time periods, authors’ personal style and type of work all determine what elements are used in the literature. The deeper more subtle side of literature is the use of symbolism, imagery and the significance of the work. In most works of literature, parallels can be drawn between the author’s personality and current life’s events through the subject matter, the characters, and the use of specific literary techniques. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s use of literary techniques in the first two stanzas of The Lover: A Ballad, are consistent throughout the six stanza ballad identifying and refuting the ways in which women were defined by literature of the 18th century era.
“At length, by so much importunity pressed, Take (Molly) at once the inside of my breast; This stupid indifference so often you blame Is not owing to nature, to fear, or to shame; I am not as cold as a virgin in lead, Nor is Sunday’s sermon so strong in my head; I know but too well how time flies along, That we live but few years and yet fewer are young.
But I hate to be cheated, and never will buy
Long years of repentance for moments of joy.
Oh was there a man (but where shall I find
Good sense, and good nature so equally joined?)
Would value his pleasure, contribute to mine,
Not meanly would boast, nor lewdly design,
Not over severe, yet not stupidly vain,
For I would have the power through not give the pain”
(Montagu, 2567)
The ballad has been traditionally known as the earliest for...
... middle of paper ...
...deeper more analytical level it is a work of great complexity with many undertones of the time period and the author’s
personal side. Any poem or work of literature can be interpreted different ways by different people but the author’s intention when writing should not be overlooked. These true intentions of who this poem is truly directed at and about lies with one person, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Works Cited
Damrosch, David, et al. The Longman Anthology BRITISH LITERATURE,
Vol. 1.. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 1999.
Ferguson, Margaret, M.J. Salter, and J. Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology
of Poetry SHORTER FOURTH EDITION. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1997.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Lover: A Ballad. The Longman
Anthology BRITISH LITERATURE, Vol. 1.. New York: Addison-Wesley
Educational Publishers Inc., 1999.
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
The Romantic period had a formative experience on the Brontes. In order to examine this formative experience, we must suppose first that the Bronte sisters had been exposed to many Dark-romantic/Gothic writings that had shaped their world-views and influenced their literary products. We will need to take a look, thus, at some of the Gothic-romantic works which certainly could have impacted the different ways in which the Bronte sisters chiseled their literary characters and created their fictional worlds.
Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.
In particular, two excerpts from Camus and Woolf offer a wealth of stylistic devices in connection with their intended themes. From The Stranger, the chosen passage tells of the main character's (Meursalt) confrontation with a threatening Arab and his resulting murder. The selection from To the Lighthouse describes the general passage of time, using a more poetic manner with its emphasis on description over plot.
There seems to be an air of paradox in bringing a theory on the novel as a genre and the most famous Anglo-American modernist poet as a whole. Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal study of ‘Discourse in the Novel’, written in 1934-35, and finally appearing in English translation in 1981, offers us an account of the difference between ‘poetic discourse’ and ‘novelistic discourse’. The division is not strictly a difference in to the novel and the poetry as genres. Often with Bakhtin we find that the novel assimilates all genres including poetry which he himself calls the process of “incorporated genres” as one of the main features of the novel. Bakhtin also opines that even non-narrative poetry can possess a degree of ‘dialogism’ for which he rates the novel so highly. Among his instances of dialogised verse as the lyrical poetry of Jules Laforgue, who exercised a great deal of influence on T S Eliot, and of Francois Villon who was extolled as poetic model by Ezra Pound.
Many may argue that the Modernist movement was a completely new and unique movement within British literature. The goal of this paper is to determine whether or not the Modernist Literary Movement was completely unique or not. The similarities found in the works of Modernist authors and poets, such as Joseph Conrad and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), will be examined against Romanticism themes and authors such as William Wordsworth. What will be found is that Modernism is not a completely unique movement, but one that combines elements from previous literary movements.
Whenever we try to imagine the feelings or motives of a writer, we impose our own thoughts and ideas, our own biases, onto that person and their work. Perhaps in order to justify our choices or legitimate the philosophies that we hold dear, we interpret texts so that they fall into place in our own ideological frameworks. Literature, because it engages with the most important and passionate questions in life, evokes responses in readers that emanate not only from the mind but also from the subconscious and from the deepest places in the heart. Writers like Virginia Woolf ask, and sometimes answer, questions about life's meaning, about the nature and importance of relationships, about spirituality, work, family, identity and so on. It is what makes writing fascinating and the critiquing of writing something more than an intellectual exercise.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are representative works of two separate movements in literature: Modernism and Post-Modernism. Defining both movements in their entirety, or arguing whether either work is truly representative of the classifications of Modernism and Post-Modernism, is not the purpose of this paper; rather, the purpose is to carefully evaluate how both works, in the context of both works being representative of their respective traditions, employ the use of symbolism and allusion. Beckett’s play uses “semantic association” in order to convey meaning in its use of symbolism; Woolf’s novel employs a more traditional mode of conveying meaning in its own use: that is, the meaning of symbols in Mrs. Dalloway is found within the text itself. Woolf’s novel exists as its own entity, with the reader using the text as the only tool in uncovering any symbolic meaning, while Beckett’s play stimulates the audience in such a way that the audience projects their own meaning in the symbols presented.
22 of Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Rpt. in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag.
In an essay on feminist criticism, Linda Peterson of Yale University explains how literature can "reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back" (330). From the viewpoint of a feminist critic, "The Lady of Shalott" provides its reader with an analysis of the Victorian woman's conflict between her place in the interior, domestic role of society and her desire to break into the exterior, public sphere which generally had been the domain of men. Read as a commentary on women's roles in Victorian society, "The Lady of Shalott" may be interpreted in different ways. Thus, the speaker's commentary is ambiguous: Does he seek to reinforce the institution of patriarchal society as he "punishes" the Lady with her death for her venture into the public world of men, or does he sympathize with her yearnings for a more colorful, active life? Close reading reveals more than one possible answer to this question, but the overriding theme seems sympathetic to the Lady. By applying "the feminist critique" (Peterson 333-334) to Tennyson's famous poem, one may begin to understand how "The Lady of Shalott" not only analyzes, but actually critiques the attitudes that held women back and, in the end, makes a hopeful, less patriarchal statement about the place of women in Victorian society.
English literature is continuously developing into a more complex, and interwoven network of shared, or argued ideas. Proof of this goes back into all of the varieties of literature that we have discovered from times past, as well as anything new that is written today. One example of these works of art that has been studied intensely over the years includes the story of The Duchess of Malfi written by John Webster somewhere between 1580 and 1625. This is a story of tragic loss, desperate love, and vicious vengeance which all comes together to form one of the greatest tragedies of all time.
She says “writing can be an expression of one 's innermost feelings. It can allow the reader to tap into the deepest recesses of one 's heart and soul. It is indeed the gifted author that can cause the reader to cry at her words and feel hope within the same poem. Many authors as well, as ordinary people use writing as a way to release emotions.” She makes plenty points in her review that I completely agree with. After reading the poem I think that Elizabeth Barret Browning is not only the author of her famous poem, but also the speaker as well. She is a woman simply expressing her love for her husband in a passionate way through poetry. In the 1st Line it reads “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” A woman drunk in love she is, and next she begins to count the numerous ways she can love her significant
Literature is an essential part of society in the present day and enables the communication between multiple parties in a written form. Texts can provide a vast knowledge on subjects dependent on content whereas novels are often seen as being purely for leisure and enjoyment. However it can often be seen that prose
Throughout history, literature has evolved with each passing era bringing new ideas and ideals to the literary world. Two eras which hold importance to the literature of today, are the Romantic and the Realist eras. With the changing and values of these times, literature took new turns which had not, or at the very least rarely had been, seen in prior years. It was thanks to these eras and poets, like John Keats and Charles Baudelaire, that the literature created today can be as expressive and imaginative as possible or even mirror real life.
There are intrinsic and extrinsic criticisms of novels, letters, and poems. Each method offers a different perspective on how the readers interpret each piece. Intrinsic criticism is the process of how readers summarize the main points of the piece. Extrinsic criticism is the background information such as: the time period, the author’s biography, and historical references. Any additional data gathered assists with the analysis of the literary text. Emily Dickinson’s poem The Wife will be analyzed by using these two methods of criticism. An intrinsic reading of the poem will be given, insight on whether extrinsic criticism contributes to the reading of the poem or alters its meaning will be disclosed, and lastly a reflection on the relative merits of both criticisms will be provided.